He filled beer mugs without watching what he was doing. He could apparently tell, by the weight of them, when to stop. He plucked bottles from their perches without pausing to check labels. He apparently had, in his head, the whole liquor layout at P.J. Clarke’s, on the East Side.

And he remembered what my companion and I were drinking, even though we had ordered just one round so far, and there were at least 35 people clumped around the bar on this early May night, and he was dealing — alone — with all the tickets from all the servers in the adjacent dining rooms, and he wasn’t writing anything down, not that I could see.

“Another?” was all he asked, and a half minute later I had a Hendrick’s gin martini, up, with olives and jagged little floes of ice, just like the martini before it. My companion was sipping a second Manhattan with rye, not bourbon, per his initial request. Mr. Quinn works quickly, and he works without error.

It is legend, this efficiency of his. I learned of it one night at PDT, a faux speakeasy in the East Village — secret entrance, abundant taxidermy — that’s about as far in spirit (and spirits) from the blunt, timeless rough-and-tumble of P. J. Clarke’s as you can get. I asked Jim Meehan, the cocktail shaman there, whom he and other celebrated young mixologists of the moment looked up to.

Without hesitation he named Mr. Quinn, 42, and not because Mr. Quinn had pioneered some clever infusion or paired two ingredients no one had thought to pair before. Mr. Quinn, he said, did right by the classics and could handle (and coddle) a teeming crowd. He had speed, stamina, dexterity, personality and an awe-inspiring memory: the essentials of bartending, without which the cheeky chemistry is meaningless. Mr. Quinn was the bartenders’ bartender.

This morning SLDN Military Advisory Council (MAC) and Reserve Officers Association (ROA) members including Brigadier General Keith Kerr CSMR (Ret.), Major General Dennis J. Laich USAR (Ret.), and Colonel Thomas Field USAR (Ret.) delivered the following letter to Congressional leaders. The letter responds to Friday’s letter from the ROA.

"Friday's letter" is a reference to a letter from two retired officers. So, it was countered by a letter by three retired officers (from the same organization) who support the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell? This isn't a game of tit-for-tat and of who can get the most fading-away soldiers to sign some letter.

The repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT) is about Congress' choice between reason or the continued acquiescence to ignorance.

The two retired officers claimed that the repeal of DADT is divisive when polls indicate nearly 80% of Americans support repealing DADT. It would seem that the two retired officers' argument rests on...their own opinions, not facts. That is unreasonable.

The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and the British Armed Forces are both considered good enough by our military to be deemed allies-in-arms, and the latter good enough to be considered worthy to fight, bleed, and die alongside US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan (places the British fought and died generations before the American military fought there--search old clippings of Victorian-era newspapers for the work "jihad" and you will find it), yet these same allies are somehow magically deemed unworthy of respect and their own commonsensical approach to allowing good soldiers to fight regardless of sexual orientation is somehow magically deemed worthless. They are our allies but, apparently, we don't welcome them; we tolerate them. Fine. Then let’s tell them to head home. Who needs allies in Iraq and Afghanistan anyway?

Such thinking is unreasonable.

The US military has essentially fired upwards of 14,000 soldiers since DADT was started, and has fired them based on something that in the military context is admittedly not irrelevant but to the professional soldier is certainly not important: the happenstance of sexual orientation. My God, even frontline, combat decorated officers who valiantly defend the republic are being fired; highly- (and expensively-) trained specialist personnel are also being fired, and a wasteful witch-hunting apparatus within the military to find cause to dismiss gay soldiers remains in place, costing the taxpayer millions of dollars so that tax-funded military assets—i.e., good soldiers—can be hunted down and run out of the services in the name of…what exactly?Unit cohesion? DADT is primarily a mean-spirited agent of unreasonable discrimination, of abject, pernicious purgation. As the term has been used by some DADT proponents, “unit cohesion” resonates like an echo of “purity”—racial or ethnic. Cohesion is disrupted by the sudden disappearance from established, tested units of solid, dependable, experienced warriors dismissed under DADT, and the cohesion concern is further belied by the numerous stories of superior officers attempted bureaucratic tricks and machinations in an attempt to keep in the ranks good soldiers who run afoul of DADT.

In effect, DADT is targeted betrayal by the military against its own soldiers. It is as if the likes of former Sen. Sam Nunn and the other architects of DADT correctly recognized that gay Americans have always been in the ranks; but, then decided in the name of purity in the ranks that DADT would be the solution for getting rid of them—getting rid of those soldiers deemed “undesirable” according to the architects’ own prejudiced, stereotype-ridden understanding of what “the gays” were like. After all, all gay people are….what? What? Just what is the problem? They’re incapable of being soldiers? Yes, much the same way that all black people devour fried chicken and all Jews are covetous Christ-haters. Ultimately, the logic is the same.

Remember that Sen. Sam Nunn, Democrat of Georgia, was DADT’s chief architect, and that DADT was voted for by the likes of Joe Biden and John Kerry. The enemies of the American solider who happens to be gay and of the American citizen—80% of us anyway—who want to be defended by good troops regardless of sexual orientation are simple bigotry and political cowardice. Democrats can give into those two mean creatures as readily as can Republicans—it all depends on the political climate.

We’re about to see who is a bigot and political coward and who is not. I expect many Republicans to be. We'll see about the Democrats.

British Security Minister Lord Alan West, a former head of the Royal Navy, told the Associated Press in July 2009 that allowing gays to serve openly was "much better. For countries that don't do that - I don't believe it's got anything to do with how efficient or capable their forces will be. It's to do with prejudices, I'm afraid," he said.

"the presence of homosexuals has not created problems in the military because homosexuality is not an issue in the military or in society at large. [M]ilitary officials from [the four countries studied--Canada, Israel, Germany, and Sweden,] said that, on the basis of their experience, the inclusion of homosexuals in their militaries has not adversely affected unit readiness, effectiveness, cohesion, or morale."

Belkin, Aaron. "Is the Gay Ban Based on Military Necessity?" Parameters, US Army War College Quarterly - Summer, 2003. "Not a single one of the 104 experts interviewed believed that the Australian, Canadian, Israeli, or British decisions to lift their gay bans undermined military performance, readiness, or cohesion."

Recommendation 2. The Department of Defense should eliminate “don’t tell” while maintaining current authority under the Uniform Code of Military Justice and service regulations to preclude misconduct prejudicial to good order and discipline and unit cohesion. The prerogative to disclose sexual orientation should be considered a personal and private matter.

Recommendation 3. Remove from Department of Defense directives all references to “bisexual,” “homosexual,” “homosexual conduct,” “homosexual acts,” and “propensity.” Establish in their place uniform standards that are neutral with respect to sexual orientation, such as prohibitions against any inappropriate public bodily contact for the purpose of satisfying sexual desires.

Scientists exploring a remote Indonesian forest say they have uncovered a collection of new species, including a Pinocchio-nosed frog, the world's smallest known wallaby and a yellow-eyed gecko.

An international group of scientists found the species in the remote Foja Mountains on the island of New Guinea in late 2008 and released the details, including pictures, on Monday ahead of the International Day for Biological Diversity on May 22.

May 17 is the International Day Against Homophobia ("Journée internationale contre l'homophobie") -- a campaign of the Quebec-based organization, Fondation Émergence -- which raises awareness about the problem of homophobia in the sports world.

The British government remained in a state of suspended animation on Sunday. Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Labour government was still holding on to power, despite having lost the election to the Tories. Without enough seats for a parliamentary majority, the Conservatives were in talks with the third-place Liberal Democrats about forging an alliance that would allow the Conservative leader, David Cameron, to eject Mr. Brown and move into No.10 Downing Street as prime minister.

Officials drew up contingency plans for the current situation, a hung Parliament, several weeks ago. The plans call for the sitting prime minister, Mr. Brown, to remain in office until he or another party leader gathers enough support to lead a government. Mr. Brown has made it clear that he hopes Labour can reach a deal with the Liberal Democrats, a plan that depends both on the implosion of the Liberal Democrats’ talks with the Conservatives and on Labour’s ability to woo legislators from the smaller parties. That possibility looks increasingly remote.

This chart shows PoliticsHome projections over the past 2 months of the total numbers of seats each of the main 3 parties will win in the UK's national election on May 6, 2010.

It's striking what a difference the first of the 3 televised debates between the parties' leaders had on projections. The Liberal Democrats projected number of seats shot skyward suddenly, largely at the expense of the Conservatives, but then it leveled out as the Conservatives regained momentum.

Now, contrast that with the chart below of the share--the percentage--of votes projected for each party. You can see why the Liberal Democrats are expected to make electoral reform a condition of their participation in a coalition government. A coalition government will be required if no one party wins enough seats to form a government outright.

As a comparison of the charts shows, the Liberal Democrats could win a larger percentage of the votes than Labour and yet end up with fewer seats in Parliament that Labour. This is because the British electoral system does not use proportional voting; it's a "first past the post" system--i.e., the constituency is awarded to the winning candidate regardless of what percentage he or she wins it by, regardless of how many votes his or her party won across the entire UK. And the boundaries of the various constituencies often are drawn to favor the Conservatives and Labour, clumping together into constituencies geographical areas where one or the other party is strong, and drawing constituency boundaries through Liberal Democrats' areas of support so as to ensure the Liberal Democrats are a minority vote-getter in as many constituencies as possible.